The Transformation of the World (114 page)

Revolutions always have local roots, in the perceptions that individuals and groups have of injustices, alternatives, and opportunities for action. These particular perceptions give rise to acts of collective disobedience and to movements that grow, bring forth opponents, and take on a dynamic of their own. In rare cases the result is what the Marxist theory of revolution takes to be the norm: whole classes become historical actors. Since revolutions have often been seen in modern times as the founding acts of nations and nation-states, the history of revolution is essentially national history; the nation “invents” itself in the common endeavor. However, the dependence of revolutions on conditions that lie outside themselves, sometimes even on external midwifery, does not fit well in this narcissistic picture. The modern European concept of revolution is narrower than the old one that used to include war and conquest: it leaves out the external international dimension, disregarding nonlocal roots and emphasizing conflict within a particular society (hence the endogenous character of revolutions).
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In extreme cases, the history of revolution was so nationally oriented that it was incapable of explaining central developments. Can one do justice to the Reign of Terror (1793–94) in the French Revolution if, like Hippolyte Taine (1828–93), one leaves out the key role of the external war danger in legitimating events?
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It was at an amazingly late date that the French Revolution was first placed in its international (European) context: by the Prussian Heinrich von Sybel in his
Geschichte der Revolutionszeit
(1853–58), and in France only after 1885 by the
historian Albert Sorel.
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This never became the dominant perspective, however; it was more than once forgotten, then brought back into memory.

For a long time, historical work on the American Revolution also featured national navel-gazing, often known in the United States as celebration of American “exceptionalism.”
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The rebellious New Englanders, it was argued, turned their backs on the corrupt Old World and, in their undemanding isolation, created a polity of unique perfection. Since most revolutions are thought unique by their protagonists and by historians who come after them, comparison between revolutions—which always puts things into perspective and deflates the myth of singularity—did not play a major role, until philosophers of history and a number of sociologists finally began to take it seriously.
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The view that it is inadequate to regard the great revolutions of the
Sattelzeit
around 1800 in Europe and America as isolated from one another has two sources. From the 1940s on, a number of historians, especially in the United States and Mexico, began to treat the history of the New World as a single whole. In their view, elements of a common experience united its different histories of settlement and colonial rule. Then in the 1950s and 1960s the vision of an “Atlantic civilization” began to take shape, which at the height of the Cold War some authors gave a strongly anticommunist or even anti-Eurasian inflection: the “West” was supposed to have somehow expanded across the ocean. But it was not necessary to follow this descent into ideology in order to recognize that a transatlantic perspective made historiographical sense. The Frenchman Jacques Godechot and the American Robert R. Palmer simultaneously developed conceptions of an Atlantic Age of Revolution, which differed only in their finer details and took in both the American and the French Revolution.
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Hannah Arendt approached the same theme from a philosophical point of view. Later historians added Haiti and the Spanish American revolutions to the picture.
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Only in the 1980s did historians begin to discover (or rediscover) a “black” Atlantic alongside the “white” and to study together a North shaped by Britain and a South molded by Spain and Portugal.
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A further impetus to grasp the Age of Revolution as more than a pan-European phenomenon (at best) came from Leipzig, where Walter Markov, a Marxist specialist on the Left in the French Revolution, and his disciple Manfred Kossok developed a comparative approach combining the tradition of Karl Marx with that of the unconventional Leipzig historian Karl Lamprecht at the beginning of the twentieth century. Kossok's concept of “cycles of revolution” with a beginning and end made it possible to theorize interaction between the revolutionaries of different countries and regions and to arrive at a fairly well founded periodization of world history.
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North America, Britain, and Ireland

Which revolutions are at issue, what are their respective temporalities, and how do they relate to one another chronologically? It is not always equally obvious when a revolution (not just a
potential
revolutionary situation) began and
when it ended; nor is the outcome unambiguous in every case. The American Revolution
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reached a first peak with the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, when all colonies except New York, representing the overwhelming majority of British subjects in North America, rejected once and for all the Crown's claim to sovereignty over them. Of course this did not come out of the blue. It was the culmination of resistance to British rule that had begun in March 1765 with protests against the Stamp Act, which, by imposing without consultation a new tax on newspapers and printed documents of any kind, had sharpened tensions between colonies and the mother country and triggered violent attacks on representatives of the colonial state.
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The Stamp Act crisis mobilized North Americans (whose unaristocratic societies had long been receptive to republican ideas) on a scale that no previous political event had occasioned.
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It created a new sense of unity among the elites of the various colonies, which differed quite considerably from one another in their forms of rule and social structure. The crisis between Britain and America escalated into economic warfare and finally, in April 1775, into open military confrontation, with General George Washington at the head of the rebellious colonies. The Continental Congress, which passed the Declaration of Independence drafted mainly by Thomas Jefferson, took place in the middle of the war. The public formulation of the reasons for independence was therefore above all a symbolic act.

The real watershed year was 1781, when two things happened: the colonies subscribed to the Articles of Confederation, a kind of constitution of the newly founded federation of states (not yet a federal state); and the British army surrendered at Yorktown, Virginia, on October 18. In the peace treaty, signed in Paris in 1783, Britain recognized the independence of the United States of America, largely on the terms laid down by the Americans, so that the United States then became a new entity in international law capable of acting in its own name. There is much to be said for the view that this marked the endpoint of the revolutionary process. But heated debates on the internal political system of the Union continued for a number of years. Only in June 1788 did the new Constitution come into effect, and spring 1789 saw the establishment of the main bodies of the state, including the presidency with George Washington as its first incumbent. In sum: the American Revolution lasted from 1765 until 1783; its chief outcome, the formation of a newly independent state, was concluded a few months before the storming of the Bastille in Paris.

The next act in the drama of the Atlantic Revolution took place not in France but in the British Isles. Between 1788 and 1791, independent revolts in Ireland, Yorkshire, and London challenged the existing order more profoundly than anything seen earlier in the century. Anyone in London who lived through the so-called Gordon Riots of June 1780, which were initially directed against fresh concessions to English Catholics, must have concluded that a great upheaval was brewing there rather than on the Continent. The disturbances caused enormous damage in the inner city; it took the army a great effort to restore order, and at
the end fifty-nine rioters were condemned to death and twenty-six executed.
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In Ireland too, the militia, including recruits from the Catholic population, had a hard time quelling unrest directly set in motion by events on the other side of the Atlantic, and after 1789, under the influence of the French Revolution, the island remained a hotbed of national rebellion. One leading historian in the field described the rising of 1798, which was supported by revolutionary France, as “the most concentrated period of violence in Irish history,”
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in which probably as many as 30,000 people (on all sides) lost their lives. The merciless punishment of the rebels lasted until 1801. In 1798–99 alone, more than 570 death sentences were handed down.
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But we are running a little ahead. In England, as in many Continental countries, sympathizers with the French Revolution raised their heads and demanded a radical, or even republican, reform of the political system in accordance with the laws of reason. The agitation was mostly confined to a pamphlet war for and against the revolution and, unlike in 1780, did not lead to open revolt.
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The conflicts became increasingly enmeshed in the threat (after February 1793, the reality) of war with France. And, as in France, criticism of the existing system might be represented as high treason. The radicalism of many intellectuals and artisans was compounded in the economically difficult war years by constant unrest in the countryside. The British state reacted with emergency laws and harsh repression (though by no means comparable to the
terreur
), so that by 1801 or thereabouts the last traces of a quasi-revolutionary challenge had disappeared and a new national consensus had formed around anti-French patriotism.
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The great political overturn failed to materialize in Britain, but the country was nevertheless caught up in the tide of revolution. Some of the most important ideas of the revolutionary epoch came from its shores—whether from dead classics such as John Locke or living publicists and agitators such as Tom Paine, whose
Common Sense
(1776) gave a powerful impulse to the American Revolution at just the right moment. The political class stood in the other camp, waging wars with varying degrees of success against both the American and the French revolutionaries. During the decades of ferment, the British oligarchy understood what needed to be done to secure its rule.

The British near-revolution of the 1780s and 1790s gave way to thirty years of conservative buttressing of the system, then to a cautious reformism from above that set the tone for the rest of the century with the electoral Reform Bill of 1832. Things remained similarly (or more) peaceful in a few but not many countries of continental Europe. The revolutionary tendencies of the age recoiled from Russia in particular, leaving Tsarina Catherine II safely in power until her death in 1796. A great peasant rebellion led by Emilian Pugachev on the southeastern margins of the empire, in which several hundred nobles lost their lives, was crushed in 1775. That would be the last revolutionary challenge to the central government for more than a century. It is true that fear of a repetition lingered in the background as a policy factor. But Russia survived the onslaught
of Napoleon's Grande Armée in 1812 without becoming infected with the ideas of Western liberalism. In 1825, in an attempt to profit from the unclear situation following the death of Alexander I, a group of noble conspirators staged a putsch to force liberalization, but the “Decembrists” were defeated within a few days and mostly vanished into Siberian exile.

France

The revolutionary turmoil on the Continent did not begin with the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, but went back to the factional fighting of spring 1782 in the republican city-state of Geneva. In the eighteenth century Geneva had experienced several periods of unrest, but the rising of 1782 was the bloodiest of all and precipitated a joint intervention by France, Sardinia, and the Canton of Bern.
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Of greater consequence, especially for the transnational concatenation of revolutions, were the events in the Netherlands where, as so often, revolution and war were closely interlinked. Once again Britain was one of the belligerents in late 1780, when, after a century of peaceful relations, it attacked the Netherlands on the grounds that Dutch ships had been supplying the rebellious North American colonies from the Caribbean. The short war resulted in military disaster for the Netherlands, unleashing the so-called Patriot Movement. This assertively nationalist initiative, influenced by the ideas of the American Revolution and the Enlightenment, sought to end the musty rule of the stadholder William V (a monarch in fact though not in name) and his clique. Anti-British and pro-French for internal more than external reasons, the Patriots triggered an onslaught from unexpected quarters: when one of their volunteer units arrested the Stadholder's spouse, a sister of the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm II, the Prussians sent in an army 25,000 strong with backing from London to free the good lady and to restore the incompetent Prince of Orange to power.
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The Patriots then disappeared underground for the time being or fled abroad; after a period of harsh reaction, the Dutch ancien régime was swept away by the French invasion of 1795. The key point is that the French public, accustomed to confrontations with Britain and Prussia, regarded the inability of Louis XVI for financial reasons to come to the aid of the Dutch Patriots as a serious blow to the prestige of the French monarchy.

The chief causes of the French Revolution did not lie in foreign policy. Like all such phenomena in the history of revolutions, it was mainly “homemade.”
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But the dynamic of social conflict, the power of radical ideas, or the national will of an increasingly self-confident people cannot alone account for the king's dramatic loss of legitimacy from the mid-1780s on. The explanation of why a (potentially) revolutionary situation passed into the actuality of a revolutionary process must include both the strength of the rebellious dynamic and the weakness of its target of attack. Here begins a line of historical reasoning that considers, along with social tensions and ideological radicalization, the attempts made by the country in question to safeguard its place within the international
hierarchy.
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France had recently (in 1763) lost the struggle for global hegemony with Britain in the Seven Years' War, which, despite London's otherwise quite generous attitude at the peace negotiations in Paris, had driven it out of North America for good and greatly weakened its position in India.